While the focus is now on health-care reform and the economy, and political prognosticators try to divine the implications of both for the 2010 elections, there is another issue bubbling: corruption. Nancy Pelosi famously promised to “drain the swamp,” but the swamp is overflowing. The Hill reports:

The ethics spotlight on House Democrats is intensifying amid predictions from political analysts that Republicans will pick up many seats in next year’s midterm elections. Few are going so far as to say that the GOP will win back the House, but ethics controversies are key to the rise of the minority party in the lower chamber. Republicans capitalized on Democratic ethics woes to win the House in 1994 and Democrats turned the tables on the GOP in 2006, catapulting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Speaker.

Well, few said the House would flip in 1994—before it did. But then in 2006, corruption helped fuel a growing backlash against incumbents that turned an off-year election into a “wave” election wherein voters decided those in power had not only mishandled the pressing issue of the day (in 2006, it was the Iraq War) but had also violated the public trust.

After the 2006 elections, pundits squabbled: Was it the Iraq war (pre-surge) that had riled up the country, or was it the spate of corruption scandals—from Tom DeLay to Mark Foley—that jettisoned the Republicans from power? Both perhaps. Wave elections, or the “perfect storm,” as Republicans referred to the 2006 debacle, occur when multiple factors push and prod voters into turning out in force to “throw the bums out.”

In 2010, the substantive issues are likely to be high unemployment and the mounds of accumulated debt. But just as the minority party in 1994 and in 2006 claimed that corruption scandals were evidence of the majority’s self-enrichment at the expense of the public, so too in 2010 you can expect to hear challengers claim that congressmen enriched themselves or evaded taxes even as ordinary people lost their jobs and the debt exploded. How effective that argument will be depends in large part on how serious the Democratic leadership is about draining the swamp and getting our fiscal house in order now.

.